I see no reason to celebrate the life of Margaret Thatcher. I offer sympathy to her family, of course, but we have to remember what Margaret Thatcher did for this country.

In one of her first moves on coming to office she delivered capital market liberalisation. What that meant was that money was allowed to roam free around the world. The tax haven boom began as a direct result. The assault of capital on democracy followed. The shift of taxation from capital to labour became inevitable. The current crisis on corporate responsibility and tax is the direct consequence.

Then she delivered the ‘Big Bang’ in financial services in London, removing regulation, allowing integration, encouraging financialisation and putting growth at all costs without consideration of prudence at the heart of banking. The 2008 banking crisis was the direct consequence. The failures of HBOS, Lloyds, RBS, Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley can all be laid at her door.

And culturally she gave us greed. The ethical corruption of Barclays and so many other companies could not have happened without Thatcher.

In the process she showed indifference to unemployment and a contempt for people who worked for a living. Unions may have needed reform; they never needed the Thatcher prescription. And we paid the price for her spite in the collapse of manufacturing as she squandered oil revenues on increasing the number claiming social security benefits from 2 million to 6 million. That was the price of her social engineering; the lack of engineering in our economy is another legacy. And she blighted large parts of the country in the process, delivering the now familiar bias to the South East.

In the pursuit of power, reward and control for a few at the price of the many Thatcher split Britain. She ruled for the 1%. For 99% her rule was a disaster. Which means that one day, with the long lens of history, it may well be seen to have been so for the 1% too. But just not yet.

The reason we have a deficit word repeated without end and high unemployment is a direct result of the banks (well this time), she deregulated them and they took insecurable risks freely (though I have to admit the following governments were fools to let it continue).

When it came to roost they panicked, closed industry left right and centre. I know as I was there in transport! you could not collect unpaid goods fast enough and the overtime seemed without end, though we all knew that if the companies we sell to are going under, how long before we are affected?

Several companies allowed me to have a look at their books too, and to say they were profitable was an understatement.

But their inability to pay back immediately resulted in their liquidation.

Another right winger in denial about the failures of Thatcherite economics, as is usually the case these days. It’s funny how those of you on the right who are so keen on preaching ‘responsibility’ at others refuse to accept it when it applies to the catastrophic failure of your own ideology, which has ended in the bankers’ gred and incompetence being paid for by everybody else.

Richard is not laying the sole blame for 2008 in Thatcher, but he’s pointing out that the process that brought it about started with the policies she introduced, and which weren’t reversed or addressed by successive governments. And by the way, she was only able to win 3 times because of our electoral system, not because she ever got a majority of the electorate voting for her.

@SOTD – well said! One argument for a PR electoral system is that even if Thatcher had got in in 1979 she would have probably been part of a coalition with the Liberals – who in those days were still kind of centre-left, not the Tory Xeroxes that we have today under Nick Clegg.

Richard, one of the by-blows of Thatcher’s attitude to manufacturing was the effect of those views on our merchant marine. When she entered No. 10, the UK had one of the largest, if not the largest, merchant fleets in the world. By the time she left No. 10 our merchant fleet was a shadow of its former self, as a result of “out-flagging” – the practice of registering ships under “flags of convenience”, usually Panamanian.

Thatcher, like all neo-liberals, viewed this with equanimity – if the service is delivered, and delivered efficiently, what does it matter who delivers it? (Shades of public service out-sourcing?). Of course, the working conditions of sailors sailing under “flags of convenience” was usually significantly worse than under UK merchant marine conditions (another attack on reasonable Trade Union power), as UK regulation went out of the window, but so also did the income stream of moneys from registration under the UK flag.

The main point, however, is that leaving our merchant marine to the vagaries of non-UK oversight is not a sensible policy, given the fact that we are an island and rely on the import of manufactured goods (not least food) for much of our needs, so that maintaining a UK Merchant Navy seems to me to be every bit as important as maintaining a UK manufacturing base.

Finally, remembering that Britain’s survival in the 2nd World War was due just as much to the Merchant Navy as to the Royal Navy, I cannot help feeling that Churchill would have done the equivalent of sending Margaret Thatcher to the Tower for her callous myopia.

Exactly. Flags of convenience were a classic lowest common denominator attempt to evade standards of decency, as enforced by regulation. It’s the same mentality that locates polluting industries in 3rd world countries, rather than in 1st world countries that enforce decency by regulation. Union Carbide and Bhopal springs immediately to mind. Of course, not all 1st World countries protect their citizens – the case of ILVA, in Taranto, Italy, springs to mind.http://www.irishtimes.com/business/sectors/manufacturing/steel-plant-pollution-and-bribery-scandal-engulfs-italians-1.953240
Who actually wants to live in a country that tolerates and allows this? Or does the profit motive (for a tiny few) trump decency, morality and the public weal?

people can complain about what she did all they like (and lets face it, the poll tax was fundamentally flawed in terms of social justice), but the fact of the matter is she was re-elected 3 times – this dosent quite reconcile with her ruling for the 1%. It seems that a large proportion of the electorate thought she (for it was largely her than the tory party at large) should be elected prime minister and to govern in their interests.

“There’s very clear evidence that with a biased media people can be persuaded to vote against their best interests” – so ordinary people can be trusted to vote for themselves in case they are influenced? Are they in need of re-education? Perhaps the majority just don’t agree with you?

“But it does mean I support press reform” – or press supression, perhaps you could take some tips from the Apartheid government you accuse Maggie of supporting

As far as I’m aware – and I don’t mean just amongst those who despise her – all the evidence from the time and subsequent academic studies show that Thatcher would not have won a second term in office had it not been for the Falklands war. Luckily for her we ‘won’ that conflict, but it seems to me that many people have forgotten how close we came to disaster and how many British (and Argentinian) service personnel lost their lives or were maimed as a result of that. And, like so many things that Thatcher did, the Falklands issue continues unresolved.

And don’t forget, we now know how she won the Falklands War….not just with Ronnie’s help but with the assistance of a certain South American butcher, Gen Pinochet…a favour she was ever grateful for and returned in spades when he later found himself under house arrest in London….democratic? Mmmmmm!

A large part of the electorate can so easily be misled into believing something is true when in fact it is not. Read the Daily Mail and you could easily conclude that anyone in receipt of state benefits, whether a pensioner, a 100% disabled individual, a worker on a low wage or simply someone between jobs, should be viewed as potential Philpott. Listen to our government and you might well be one of the apparent majority who believe that unemployment benefits represent 27% of the benefit budget when the real number, the government’s own number, is 3%.

What this government learned at Thatcher’s knee was how to engage with populism as a means towards gaining and maintaining political control and then advancing the cause of neo-liberlaism. Democracy meant that Thatcher won 3 terms; it could not and did not control the reality, not the disseminated view, that she ruled for the ultimate benefit of the 1%, whether by choice or accident.

@Carol – agreed, and how! As Richard says, the oil drained into what was then the DSS and UB40.

Besides, it’s a VERY myopic view of Britain’s pre-1979 economy, with the Japanese example showing how we COULD have used the oil to retain AND modernize our manufacturing base.

That would have avoided shameful outcomes, such as that of Mittal mothballing Billingham steelworks, because it was competing with his Indian steelworks – great for India but crap for Teesside, and the UK, who picked up the Welfare Benefits bill. You shouldn’t sell off your family silver, and incidentally, what does this say about the “free” market, given the mothballing was a direct market intervention!

Last point @anthony and others, Thatcher won in 83 and 87, as did Blair in 2001 and 2005, because the Opposition was weak and divided and NEITHER ever secured a bigger share of the vote than Alec Douglas-Home when he LOST to Harold Wilson in 1964. Also, in all 4 above Thatcher/Blair elections, a majority voted AGAINST the winner – hardly a real mandate, but better than Cameron, (though the Tories did actually get a higher share of the vote in 2010 than did Blair in 2005)

I wonder if you remember the governments that came before? I wonder if you remember the 3 day week, the power cuts, the bodies not being buried. I wonder if you recall the prevaling attitude of a Britain once great but now declining. I wonder if you recall customer service courtesy of British Telecom before privatisation? I wonder if you remember the cars served up by British Leyland? The cure might have been tough, but the situation was dire.

I remember that the resource of North Sea oil was wasted by Thatcher . We should have used this once in a lifetime benefit to modernise our industry, instead many good companies went to the wall, or to establish a sovereign wealth fund for the future. Today I also think of the many families in the West Midlands whose lives were devastated by the scourge of unemployment from which they have never recovered. It is almost too painful to reflect on those times and then to realise that we are now experiencing the same wasteful policies in what seems to be a much more brutal way.

Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson make a good case, in their book ‘Going South’, that the UK has, for some time been on the road to becoming a ‘Third World’ economy….the story of North Sea oil bears this out….Chavez was oh so right to nationalise Venezuela’s oil industry…..Thatcher gave it away to the multi-national corporations…..the oligopolistic models for a ‘free market economy’?…….

Roger, you make an excellent point . I, too, have read Going South and as I have a Masters in Development Studies, I am able to see the many similarities beteeen the UK and a third world economy -high youth unemployment etc. Of course, Chavez was demonised by the West but he used oil revenues to implement social policies to benefit the poor in his country.

“Then she delivered the ‘Big Bang’ in financial services in London, removing regulation, allowing integration, encouraging financialisation and putting growth at all costs without consideration of prudence at the heart of banking. The 2008 banking crisis was the direct consequence. The failures of HBOS, Lloyds, RBS, Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley can all be laid at her door.”

The Big Bang was all about the deregulation of the stock (equity) market and the removal of the distinction between stock jobbers and stock brokers. Nothing to do with any of the banks that you mention or any of their predecessors.

If anything banks were more highly regulated, particularly in the front office (client acceptance / money laundering) under the FSA regime than its predecessors. The banks you mention failed due to basic banking errors of poor asset quality and excessively short term borrowing. Without absolving the management of the banks from their respective responsibilities, both issues should have been monitored by their supervisor. Unfortunately the matter seemed to get lost when responsibility was handed to the FSA from the BoE. Not due to an unwillingness to regulate so much as a lack of understanding of what was required.

Has there been a Conservative coup at the BBC TV? Last night and this morning it was an endless queue of Senior Conservatives who promulgated her greatness with next to no economists, other politicians, social scientists and cultural analysts’. It was not without reason Oxford did not give her an honorary doctorate. We have of course today some quoted , for example, in the FT claiming she performed a Supply Side revolution and squeezed inflation out of the system by large scale unemployment . We have some acknowledgement that yes it was hard politics and that sadly there was the fall out of the large social and regional divides in the UK, the decline in manufacturing( although little on the sell off assets to the wealthy) but remarkably nothing on why was it that Germany, France, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway did not go down the Thatcherite route. There were alternatives but our media have always been mute on that.

Leslie – the BBC has, IMHO, been doggedly pursuing a right-wing pro-Tory line since the ConDem coalition came to power. Whether this is because the senior management or the editorial team are Conservative sympathisers or whether because they are running scared of being sold off or facing even larger cuts in the future than the huge cuts already imposed by the government, I’m not sure. But one has to look to Channel 4 News for decent TV news coverage these days. And bizarrely, Sky News is often less partisan than the BBC News at the moment! Incredible given that it’s a Murdoch operation but there you go.

Howard, I was involved in a co-production with the BBC last year and my impression was they were/are running scared. Even working on a factual programme about UK infrastructure getting the producers to include anything that wasn’t ‘mainstream’ thinking (i.e. basically free market, deregulation, etc) was pretty impossible. That doesn’t of course mean there aren’t Tory sympathisers there (particularly given Paten’s involvement), but my impression was that that wasn’t the main source of their timidity.

I think your opinion that the BBC now stands for the Broadcaster Backing Conservatives is correct, and has been steadily moving in that direction over the last few years, and accelerated by orders of magnitude in the last few days. As you point out it is also bizarre Sky News is often less partisan than the BBC lately, maybe that’s just Murdoch sending out a “message”. I have also swithced over to CH4 News, it has become the only credible option.

I wonder if when those “news” channels start live coverage of the recall of Parliament “to pay tirbute”, they will spend anytime mentioning that IPSA has said MP’s abroad can claim up to £3750 in expenses to return?

@ Leslie48 – I’m with you on this (as are most of those who read this Blog, and many other people who have never heard of Tax Research UK) “FT claiming she performed a Supply Side revolution and squeezed inflation out of the system by large scale unemployment”. Sickening – especially since it is complete bollocks.

People forget that Harold Wilson inherited a rate of inflation of nearly 11% from the Heath Government and bumbling Chancellor Barber, and though inflation peaked under Wilson at 28%, he brought it down further AND faster than Thatcher did in her first administration,

She inherited a rate of about 10.7% in 1979, which peaked in around October 1980 at 22%, and was only brought down to the rate she inherited after 3 more years, but at the price of tripling the rate of unemployment (whereas unemployment had remained steady or even fallen under Wilson’s successful attack on inflation).

Frankly, I don’t call taking 3 to 4 years and tripling unemployment to get back to your starting point an economic miracle. Indeed, at best it was economic incompetence on a par with Barber’s “dash for growth” – the real root cause, along with the 1973 oil shock. At worst, it was cruel social engineering on behalf of the few against the many who were “not one of us”, to use Thatcher’s malign phrase.

did she show indifference to unemployment? As I recall she accepted short term unemployment as a price worth paying to solve the bigger problem. You might argue the legacy she left Blair demonstrated she was right.

I disagree but due to the Comments policy won’t go into details here (I’ve published elsewhere and your readers don’t come here for paeans to Thatcher) – I would acknowledge the sympathy you gave to her immediate family, even given your politics, which is more magnanimous than many commenting yesterday.

Death does not redeem character. One can extend every human sympathy to her family for the emotional distress of their loss, but that does not mean that one should also feel compelled to pull one’s proverbial punches when discussing her record.

One of the reasons she won three elections was simple bribery. She took state assets and sold them at a massive discount to win votes. We taxpayers paid every penny of the full price for council houses to be built, she sold them off at a large discount. The same with state enterprises. By ensuring that small investors made an undeserved profit she gained massive popularity. She sold MY assets to buy HER votes.
I remember one of her ministers being queried as to why they counted the sale of capital assets as “income” and his reply that it was “normal accounting practice”. It was of course a one-off trick, which we still have to pay for today. Perhaps you have to be a conservative economist to understand why selling assets to try to boost the economy is different to borrowing money for the same purpose.
(Though in fairness it is worth remembering just how expensive, backward and inefficient the phone service was 30 years ago)

I’m not sure I can be as concise as others here, but will share some observations on things I don’t think were mentioned yet. In order to help the Treasury, Maggie forced a fire sale, with appropriate high pressure marketing, to turn us into a nation of share holders. How many of those small packets of BT, BG, BNOC, etc are still with personal holders. Going further the Treasury and Bank of England were told to sell their holdings in private companies.
At the time I worked for BP and remember the Army abseiling down the office block (and getting stuck) to reveal the sale price of £3.30. Next week, Black Monday and the market price was down to £1.80, the start of the ‘privatisation’ failure.
The BP Chairman, Bob Horton, is still the only BP Chairman not to receive a peerage, but Maggie looked after him…..He broke up and sold British Rail for her, for well under its valuation.
That gives us a tranche of large companies intended to spread the wealth under Maggie’s visions and a one off income for the Treasury. Where are we now?

All in good time it will be interesting to see how much, if any, of the Thatcher fortune comes back to us in inheritance tax.
In David Camerons words “We are all in this together” so it should not be “off shore” and so the nation should be gaining a tidy sum.

Actually, the Treasury has, and continues to do well out of Petroleum Revenue Tax from the North Sea.
The Government did set up a British National Oil Company with preferable choices of ‘blocks’ for exploration and production. In order to attract staff to Glasgow (!) the salaries and perks were obscene. When the company was privatised, a golden share was retained by the Treasury to guarantee the Glasgow location and good behavior by the purchaser – BP. As soon as the Golden Share was cancelled, staff were bought off and Glasgow shut down, anything left moved to Aberdeen.

I thought this post by Bill Mitchell, on Thatcher’s time in office was pretty good:
Society buckled and is damaged but has never disappeared (http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23353)
“I lived there when she attacked a small island off Argentina at a time she was about to lose office. The little two-up-two-down working class terraces in the grimy streets that I lived in up in Manchester were adorned with British flags and the working class tories impoverished by Thatcher’s Monetarist assault on them multiplied and she won the next election. An amazing sense of denial of reality was in the streets – similar I think to the tea party morons who will suffer the most materially from the policies they are supporting.

Mass delusion is very hard to explain when drugs are not present. At least in the late 1990s etc, the neo liberals were able to run amok and cut this and that and transfer massive amounts of real income to the top-end-of-town because they opened up the credit tap and we all happily sedated ourselves bingeing on consumption goods bought on the never never.

However, despite all that personal hurt and loss of public dignity, one of the most significant consequences of this era was that it was marked the beginning of the end for the social democratic parties – such as British Labour, Australian Labor Party, etc.

It was during this period – under the onslaught of Monetarism – that these parties all abandoned the ideals of social democracy and public purpose that had shaped their policy platforms since their inception.”

What a lot of posts, just shows what an impression she made. At the time I disagreed with a lot of what she did and still do. I was just coming out of my Socialist phase at the time but I still knew she had balls. That’s something the Lefties on your post just can’t get their heads around. She had a big part ending the Cold War, and showed the Argentinian Government Britain was not a push over. And she faced up to barking mad Union power. She realised the State could not run industry. I do not like all the neo liberal implications that came to pass subsequently but her efforts were necessary to free Britain from its post war malaise.

Does anyone remember just before the Falklands conflict arose, mother Thatcher and her lap dogs were on a policy of cutting down the armed forces because she said the country could not afford them. The aircraft carrier Ark Royal was going to be sold to the Aussies. Then the invasion kicked off, no mention of cost to run this war with no then idea what the turn-out would be, ( does anyone know the cost of that war?) Now, as I saw it then and now, prevention is better than cure. You can’t tell me that intellegence didn’t know what was in the pipe line! If the 3 armed forces were to have been on exercise down that neck of the woods, I doubt very much that Argentina would have invaded, thus saving many lives on both sides of the fence. Just a thought. I think it is dissgraceful that the Navy & RAF helicopter rescue squadrons are to be privatised, it is vital that these services require to hone their skills, it is good training for them if ever their skills are requuired in time of conflict. I hear a rumour that the Tories are putting out to tender the armed forces to the lowest bidder!